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Boycotting Pink Toys for Girls

By Lisa Belkin December 22, 2009 4:40 pmDecember 22, 2009 4:40 pm

Illustration by Barry FallsGender

I have two sons and six nieces, meaning my main contact with the color pink comes at this time of year, when I get updates on whether the girls can abide it. They either love it — meaning they won’t wear anything but pink, so don’t bother buying red or blue presents Aunt Lisa — or they won’t have anything to do with it. Talia and Ruth are “strongly against ‘girly-girl things,’” my sister warned last month when I asked her for their wish lists. I was glad for the warning, because it wasn’t too long ago that Talia and I went on a sparkles-and-pink shopping spree for her birthday.

My nieces are not the only ones with strong opinions about pink. Abi and Emma Moore, twin sisters in Britain, are the founders of PinkStinks, which they created about a year ago because of a growing realization that their houses were looking different from each other. Abi, a TV journalist, has two sons, and her home was filled with trucks and construction toys. Emma, a government manager, has two daughters, and her home contained dolls who cooked and tried on clothes. Girls needed better role models, the sisters decided, and set out to do something about it.

Early this month they called for a boycott of the Early Learning Center, a large toy retailer in Britain, which PinkStinks accuses of “acting irresponsibly” by dividing its catalogue and Web site into boy toys and girl toys and its stores by pink and blue. A call to action on the Web site describes the problem as follows:

The swathes of pastel pink all along one side clearly signpost to a child what’s for them and what isn’t. Girls go one way, boys another – without even thinking about it. And we’re not convinced having a few pictures of girls playing with construction toys and making an ironing board available in pink and blue is enough. It feels like tokenism and we expect and hope for more from companies like the Early Learning Center. We don’t believe this is real choice – more an illusion of choice.

ELC is not the cause of the larger problem of gender bias, the Web site says, nor is it the only culprit, but symbolic boycotts have to start somewhere. PinkStinks got the idea from two 13-year-old boys in Sweden who were similarly distressed by the holiday catalog from Toys “R” Us, what with its photos of boys being active and girls being sweet and passive. They took their complaints to the Swedish Advertising Ombudsman, who publicly reprimanded the company, saying it “discriminates based on gender and counteracts positive social behaviour, lifestyles and attitudes.”

Time was, not so long ago, when things were the other way around; pink was for boys and blue was for girls. Near the end of World War I, The Ladies Home Journal advised new mothers that “the generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” A few years later, in 1927, Time Magazine wrote about the disappointment that Princess Astrid of Belgium was not a Prince, saying her cradle had been “optimistically decorated in pink, the color for boys.”

As my nieces can tell you, things have changed since then. That pink now stands for girls is, in part, the legacy of feminism, says Prof. Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, who is working on a book to be called “Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America.” During the height of the women’s movement, she says in an interview with the BBC, pink was shunned as “the color you were not going to put your little girl in because dresses were bad and pink was bad and we were going to eliminate all the frippery from little children’s clothing so that they could grow up to be whatever they wanted to be. Ironically, what I think that did was firmly fix pink as the ultimate feminine color by the end of the 1970s.”

And now that pink is back, it is back with a vengeance.

“For maybe the past decade or so, little girls have inhabited a universe that is, almost entirely, pink,” the British newspaper, The Guardian, explained recently in a fascinating examination of the meaning of pink. “It is made up not just of pink princesses and fairies and ballerinas and fluffy bunnies, but of books, bikes, lunchboxes, board games, toy cookers, cash registers, even games consoles, all in shades of pink. This Christmas is no exception. There is a pink globe, specially for girls. Scrabble has been repackaged in pink (the tiles on the front of the box spell FASHION). Monopoly has gone pink, with the dog, thimble and shoe pieces replaced by flip-flops, a handbag and a hairdryer, houses and hotels becoming boutiques and malls, and utilities turned into beauty salons. In at least one major supermarket chain you can now buy slices of bright pink ham, cut into heart shapes and called Fairy Hearts.”

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We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more